Feb 13 - Blok & Downey reaction

The first article of this book reminded me of a time when I worked for a private high school with nearly 10000 students -- that was before the commercial internet era. They were mostly from the upper middle class families in town. To organize the personal and mailing information for all of them was not simple, since data was not in a database. However, when this process was concluded and everything was in a single file (what was not the smartest thing, technically speaking), several companies in town started to call in and try to buy that file. It was only then that the owners of the school understood that the laborious process of setting up that file had a market value. Over the years, the list was sold both legally and not-legally (i.e., someone 'leaked' that list to a certain company). One day, an individual calls the school management office offering a list of prospective students to whom the school should address their marketing effort. It was purchased by what, at the time, was a price 5 times higher than what they initially charged for their own list when they first sold it. Only to find out that it was exactly the same list, as of 2 years before.

This book gives us the clear feeling that we are in a society driven by information and technology, more than anything else. If in the earlier centuries the natural resources were one of the key elements to determine the wealth of a nation, in the later ones it gradually shifted the process of acquiring and producing information about such resources, as well as developing technologies to better (=faster, more effienciently, etc) process them.

This reading seems to confirm my personal critique of the work of Castells, regarding to the little attention he pays to role of history and culture in terms of technological development. The article from Rosenchaft seems to explore this point from the very beginning, by highlighting the role of the information 'manager' in times when everything was done manually. It would make sense to think that the development of automated systems would be a demand from such reality, and not the other way around -- changes in labour practices being a consequence of the technological advancement. It seems to corroborate Feenberg view "that technology is socially shaped."

Another concept strike me as very important to the understanding information labor's role in society: that of cultural appropriation, and the effects of capitalism and western cultural domination in the information world as both the cause and the consequence of its prominence in the development of communication technologies and the internet. It seems to me that, once again, the 'revolution' came as a result of economically driven efforts to maximize profit, more than a social demand of ways to alleviate the work burden out of the new technology workers.